Recruiting: good to great

May 2013
Why?

• To Be Great at Recruiting

• Great Recruiting is:

• Telling Stories – Company & Positions

• Understanding the Candidate

• Crafting an Experience

• Work to make it a strength of your org

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Role of Talent

• Create the Experience

• Keep the Trains Moving

• Troubleshoot
• Learn to use data

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Agenda

• Recruiting Process/Experience

• Interview Structure

• Preparing Offers

• Compensation Data

• Sourcing

• Scaling Culture – Steve Cadigan

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The Experience

• The goal of recruiting is more than just a repeatable process, it is

about crafting an overall experience

• You should be deliberate about every step a candidate goes

through. Be aware of:

• It’s purpose

• What it feels like to go through

• Map steps and measure how long it takes

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The Experience
• Basic Anatomy

• Introduction

• Evaluation

• Connection

• Close

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Setup
• Goal:
• Sync with manager on the ideal candidate and prepare the interview team.

• The Position:

• Why does this role exist and what is the potential impact to the company?

• What will the person work on the first 3, 6, 12 months? Why is it interesting?

• What hard skills do they need? Required vs. nice to have – prioritize

• Perquisite experience? How senior?

• What are you willing to trade off: domain experience vs. coding chops

• Ideal candidates? Where do they work? Look through LinkedIn together

• Process:
• Select interview team and give them responsibilities – more to follow

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Introduction
• Goal: Generate Interest & Understand What They Value (LISTEN TO THEM)

• Generate Interest (storytelling):

• Why does the company exist and why does that matter?

• Why are you going to succeed where other have failed?

• Why does the company matter to you? Mission? Culture?

• Upcoming projects

• Set Expectations and Prepare for what lies next

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Introduction
• Discovery:

• Why are they looking and how serious are they?

• What are they not getting from their current company?

• When are they looking to make a decision? Timing?

• Who is the competition? Other startups, founding something, large companies

• What do they want out of their next position?

• What’s their current comp and what are they looking for? Stock vs. cash?

• Who are the decision makers? Parents, wife, kids, etc…

*WRITE IT DOWN & SYNC WITH THE HIRING MANAGER

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Evaluation
• Goal:
• Evaluate Fit , Communicate the Responsibilities of the Position &
Answer Outstanding Questions

• Main Areas:
• Work Experience, Relevant Skills, Culture Fit.

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Evaluation
• Work Experience

• Systematically breakdown what they’ve done for the past 5 years.

• What projects where they working on? What were their specific
responsibilities? – Really dig into the details.

• What did they deliver? How did they influence the direction of the product?

• How much autonomy did they have to make decisions? Enough, too much?

• Did they work on core parts of the project?

• How did they deal with roadblocks? What happens when they get frustrated?

• Look for people that had key roles and that have had increased responsibility
over time. Each role should be a step forward.

*Takeaway: What have they done, how well did they do it, was it hard

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Evaluation
• Relevant Skills: Break it down to the fewest people possible

• Technical Skills

• Programming languages, writing abilities, sourcing

• Problem Solving

• CS Fundamentals, deductive reasoning, situational questions

• They should be relevant to the position

• Practicals

• Tests, presentations, role playing

• Can be used as a filter if you have a lot of applicants or towards the

end of the process if you need to do a lot of selling.

• Examples of Previous of Work

• Code Samples, writing samples, portfolio

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Evaluation
*Takeaways:
• Strength of knowledge on each required skill
• Horsepower
• Problem solving abilities
• Quality of work

*2 - 3 interviews:
• Always leave time for questions and for interviewers to talk about their
experience

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Evaluation
• Culture Fit:

• Understand and quantify your culture first

• How do decisions get made?

• Conviction of ideas?

• How collaborative?

• Pedigree?

• Passions/Interests?

• Positive vs. questioning?

• How independent are people expected to be?

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Evaluation
• The questions asked should be relevant to your current culture or the one
you’re trying to build

• How much control do you want over decisions?

• How do you handle disagreements with coworkers? What do you do if you

disagree with a decision that’s been made?

• What risks have you taken? What was the outcome, what did you learn?

• When have you gone out of your way to do something or learn a skill that
wasn’t required?

• When was the last time someone was critical of your work, how did you handle
it?

*Takeaways: How well do they fit into the organization you have and do you think
they can adapt?

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Connection
• Find ways of endearing the candidate to you

• Social interaction:
• Team lunch, dinner, golf, ping pong
• Potentially engaging other interests: family-life, outdoor activities, etc

• Check-in:
• Engage the candidate after their onsite
• How excited are they?
• What questions do they need answered?
• Offer to spend more time outside of the interview process
• Discuss career growth and future aspirations

• Love Bomb:
• Have the interviewers reach back out
• Send a gift basket that relates to their interest

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Debrief
• Goal: Moderate a discussion with Hiring Manager and Interviewer(s) to determine
hiring decision

• Facilitating the conversation:

• Require concrete data
• Avoid statements like “I feel”

• Be thoughtful about the order in which people give feedback

• Don’t have the most influential people speak up first

• Look for a champion

• A weak YES is really a NO

• Don’t hire someone to be the weakest person on the team

• Get value out of “no’s”

• Know why they are a pass
• Learn what would have made them a YES

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Close: pre-offer
• Goal: Have the candidate ready to accept before the offer is delivered

• Begins at the Introduction: Reinforced through each stage of the process (slide 8)

• Take each thing they value and cross it off the list as you interact with the
candidate

• Have hiring manager and other leaders communicate the vision for the
company and how the candidate fits in. Why it is a career and not a job.

• Constantly check-in:
• How excited are they about the position?
• What concerns to the they have about the company, job, etc?
• What questions do they need answered?
• How does it compare to other positions?
• If terms could be agreed upon, would you accept?
• When can you start?

• Learn to position against: smaller companies, other startups larger companies

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Close: talking numbers

• Making Comp Recommendations

1. Employee’s comp history – discuss early

2. Expectations/Motivations (equity vs. cash)

3. Industry benchmarks

4. Competing offers

5. Internal comparisons

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Close: delivery

• Figure out the best person to deliver the offer

• Hiring manager, CEO, Recruiter

• Have a “confidant”
• Typically the recruiter, someone that can discuss the details of the
offer while still being removed from the negotiation

• Negotiation
• Avoid unless they’re ready to accept

• Sign-on Bonus

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Close: the counter

• Mentally prepare the candidate for a counter offer

• Strengthen their resolve

• Stay connected, it’s not done until they show up

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Experience Killers
• Time in process
• Clock is ticking from initial intro or connection
• Treat employee referrals like gold
• Lumpy communication
• Follow-up immediately
• Missing interviews or being left waiting
• Not paying complete attention – checking phone/email
• Inconsistent expectations between interviewers, candidates
• Asking the same questions
• People that don’t know what the hell they’re talking about
• Weak Process
• Not challenging enough

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Useful Metrics
• Goal: Understand conversion and time in process

• Overall Conversion Funnel

• Total Outreach  response rate  interview process  offer

• Instrument interview process

• Track each stage in ATS
• Understand the funnel conversion from phone screen to offer
• Track days spent in each step

• Offer Conversion
• Run a post-mortem on each rejected offer, avoid making the same mistake
twice

• Sources
• Track where offers and hires come from, will help you better allocate time

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Comp
• Define your philosophy:

• Create salary bands

• Don’t be a slave to data but be aware when you’re breaking band

• Update bands each year

• Start to level employees but don’t worry about it until 50 or so

• Stock Refresh
• @ 3 years in

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Comp: trends
• Modest increase in salary and equity (<5%) from 2012

• Average Salary for New Grad Engineers at top companies: $100K

• Companies are essentially paying 2 years ahead of current experience
• Will likely push other salaries up

• Little to no discount on salary for early stage companies

• Perks are getting more creative

• Laundry service, task rabbit, uber

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